At the end of the era when the GN was running the old heavy weight passanger cars, what would be the most commonly used steam locos they would use to pull the main through trains?
Art,
I have seen pictires of S1 & S2 Northerns in St Paul, but most ‘Goats’ tell me that the transcon trains like the Empire Builder/Oriental Limited generally were pulled by P2 Mountains from St Paul, and the Northerns west of Havre, MT. Of course by the end of steam, the S1 & S2 engines may have been assigned to areas that had been dieselized by then.
The Empire Builder went streamlined in 1947, and the E7 diesels arrived even earlier.
Jim
I have the impression that GN’s S-1’s were taken off of passenger service fairly quickly and replaced by the S-2’s. The S-1’s had 73" drivers, the S-2’s 80". It seems kind of strange that GN would prefer larger drivered engines for the mountains. Maybe I’m missing something.
For shorter trains, a Pacific could be in order. GN had some sweet Atlantics, but they were gone in later years.
There have been brass models of everything we’ve described here. They’re pretty available. On the plastic side, there’s nothing at present. GN engines generally don’t look like anything else, so a substitute might look a little goofy.
The above comments are based on HO scale. N scalers are lucky in that they have a model of the S-2. Or at least did. They might have heavyweights–don’t know–it’s not my scale.
Ed
PCM is coming out with a GN S-2 4-8-4 this summer (so it will probably really come next summer!) in HO. For the P-2 Mountain, I’ve wondered if you could take a Spectrum undec heavy USRA mountain, mate it to a long vandy tender, and decorate it for GN and come out with something fairly close?? Both of these were unusual for GN engines, as they had radial stay fireboxes instead of the usual squared off Belpaire ones.
Course it wasn’t unusual for a train of GN heavyweights to be pulled by diesels. GN’s purchase of diesels came before they had streamlined cars, for example the Gopher/Badger between the Twin Cities and Duluth began being pulled by FT’s in 1941, but the RR didn’t get any streamlined cars until the 1947 Empire Builder sets arrived. Those 1947 cars eventually worked their way down to the Gopher/Badger around 1950…but for about 8-10 years a standard G/B was an FT A/B set and 5-6 heavyweights.
p.s. It’s interesting that everyone calls the Omaha Orange/Pullman Green GN scheme the “Empire Builder” scheme, since it was used on GN diesels for 6 years before it was ever used on an Empire Builder equipment.